League of the Griffin

Like every kid who ever read a comic book I always wanted to write and draw one. I taught computers several times and had the kids create their own comic book heroes using a template and then had them color them digitally. As an example of what could be done I created my own team THE LEAGUE OF THE GRIFFIN who were ordinary people gifted with alien battle suits that allowed them to fight ancient mythological creatures that followed the aliens to earth. I KNOW..cool concept right? (don't answer that). I totally envy anyone who can draw. I can see the images in my mind but can't get them to translate onto the paper despite many classes trying to teach me to draw on the left side of my brain. All my work is written by a genius but drawn by an idiot.

The Javelin

Griffin Prime

The Mist

The Rapier

Viking Lament

Viking Lament

"Lo there do I see my father.
Lo there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers.
Lo there do I see the line of my people back to the beginning.
Lo, they do call to me.
They bid me take my place among them.
In the halls of Valhalla where the brave may live forever."

(13th Warrior)

Tattoo Me? Tattoo YOU!

This is the perfect gift for that kid who may not be applying himself to his studies like he should be but will need a marketable skill for the future. If he goes to prison all the better because they can always use a talented tattoo artist in the joint. If he doesn't then he can open his own shop above the Java Juice and meet drunk 18 year old co-eds. Its a win-win either way. I just love how badass these wannabee thugs look just flexing their manly biceps ripe for their 'MOM' tattoos.

BABY SMASH!!!

These stackable boxes for baby to play with are awesome. Your kid can have hours of fun putting them together only to then smash them apart like a pint sized Godzilla. And if you have one of those HUGE babies that appear on Maury every once in awhile then the fun is just ramped up to a factor of ten. The artwork on the boxes is playful too and I am kicking myself that I didn't think of it first.

He is Googam and He is Love

Guilty Pleasure Cinema - Robot Jox

As far as cheap craptacular films go, ROBOT JOX is at the top of heap. In the future the world is divided into two massive nations, the Confederacy and the Market (The USSR and the USA). During this time all teritorial disputes are settled through combat between massive robots and their drivers the Robot Jox. The story is pretty stardard cold war drama with the bad Russian and the brave defiant American. What sets this movie apart from the usual direct to video dreck are the special effect of the robots fighting. They are like Transformers or Rock-em Sock-em robots with all kinds of special defences and attacks. The miniature models are excellent. CGI was not in mainstream use until after the film was made. Therefore, Robot Jox was made with more practical special-effects such as stop-motion animation, puppetry or marionettes, and an autonomously-operating remote-controlled model in the climactic battle. The film is notable for being one of the very few examples in live-action American cinema to feature giant humanoid robots that stand taller than 20 feet, and enclose a human pilot somewhere inside who operates it; as opposed to powered armor. Unlike the Japanese entertainment industry where giant robots frequently appear in both television and film across a wide range of subjects and target audiences, North American science-fiction films lean more towards wheeled or flying vehicles and ships. And remember, "Crash and Burn!"

Steampunk Cylon and Steampunk LEGO Cylon

The steam punk design aesthetic is just about the coolest thing I can imagine.

Just Because Sock Monkey Spider-Man is Cool

Free the Clones

OMG tonight’s episode of Star Wars the Clone Wars was deep. We finally got to see some chinks on the armour of our beloved clone troopers as one named Slick turns traitor and betrays his brothers to Ventris and the Separatists. When he explains his reasons behind his actions he, for the first time, gives voice to the desire of clones to do more than be at the Jedi's beck and call. He wants more for himself than to just fight at their command. He wants his freedom. This is a far deeper issue than we have come to expect from this awesome show. I hated the Clone Wars movie but I love the TV show. If they can keep giving me episodes like the one where R2D2 kicked ass and showed why he is the top astrometric droid in the universe or whiz bang action filled stories like the one I saw tonight then I am with them for as long as the show is on the air. I suspect that Lucas has turned this show over to others because there is no way he could write anything as interesting or thoughtful. Knowing how the clones will be forced (through order 66 - a compulsion imprinted into their DNA by the evile Emperor Palpatine) to destroy the Jedi order, their fate seems all the more tragic. They may not be enslaved by the Jedi but they are not going to be given their freedom by the Imperia anytime either. And here we thought the were all just clones. I finally see them as individuals.

Kingdom Come

If I had to choose one comic story to take with me on a desert island it would be the four issue KINGDOM COME mini-series by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. I even have the two cassette audio version of the story (complete with voice actors and full sound effects). It postulates a future where the next generation of heroes have run wild and a despondent Superman must come out of self imposed exile to make things right again. By his mere prescience he draws around him all the old school heroes we know and love. But no story is great without great conflict and Superman learns that forcing change on others can lead to its own kind of problems and soon things spin out of control and we see events push the world to the edge of destruction. Only through the efforts of Batman, Wonder Woman and the humanity and sacrifice of a grown up Billy Batson (Captain Marvel) is Armageddon avoided. The photorealistic art of Alex Ross is simply gorgeous but what impresses me most is the way the story has been tweaked over the years adding final pages and final chapters to a story that only NOW feels truly finished. This year the Superman from the KINGDOM COME universe appeared in the main DC universe (JSA) in a tale that was set between KINGDOM COME #3 and #4. I have a feeling that the whole tale was an excuse to just include these final four pages that round out the original story beautifully and creates one of the 'tears in my eyes' moments. I hope they include them in any future reprinting of KINGDOM COME.

70s Celebration

I love this art piece (by Dusty Abell) containing all or most of the significant iconic pop culture images from 1970s television. I was so impressed with myself that I could name all of them which only goes to prove that I am a POP CULTURE GOD! SO WORSHIP ME...GIVE ME YOUR CHEESEBUGERS AND URKRANIAN FARM GIRLS!!!!! Let me guess it doesn't work that way. Are you saying my arcane knowledge is useless for gaining supremacy over the universe? Well aint that a bitch...bitches. So that is what crashing down to earth feels like. (click image to see the enlarged version or this sweet sweet piece of art)

Junkyard Gems

From the site nemomatic.com comes these metal sculptures by artist Nemo Gould. I love the way he take recycled parts and turns them into these whimsical creations. Makes me wish I would have taken metal shop in school. But NO, I had to take woodworking and home ec so now all I can make is a cutting board for my blueberry muffins. The masks are particularly funky.

I Loves My Lady Liberty

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

November 2, 1883
Emma Lazarus (1849 - 1887)

Nothing celebrates the promise of America like this statue in New York harbour. Ken Burns created an awesome documentary for it on his series American Stories. Its an iconic modern wonder and one day I am going to see her in person. I refer to her like she is a real person because to me she is. Every collage I create have to include three images...Spider-man, Superman and the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty, formerly known as "Liberty Enlightening the World", was the brainchild of French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, a gift from France to America. Its construction took hundreds of workers working 7 days a week, 10 hours a day, 9 years to complete in 1884. 350 statue pieces were packed into 214 crates and shipped from France to New York. The statue was reconstructed on Bedloe Island, now called Liberty Island, in New York harbor because this was where people would get their first view of the New World as they sailed into the harbor. The statue is a universal symbol of freedom that welcomes all immigrants coming to America.

Ray Gun Pen

AAAAAA Ray gun pen...ray gun pen...gimme gimme gimme

Wasted LOL Cat of the Week # 8

If you use a straw you just get drunk faster..saw it on Mythbusters.

The Late Late Show

I have started watching the Craig Ferguson show totally by accident and I have been missing out. He is hysterically funny and for some reason putting him on early in the morning has freed up his manic nature. Once he latches on to something (like a leak in his studio's roof) he is like a dog with a bone and it becomes the whole theme of the show. I am amazed at the way he circles around and around from wherever he is. He packs more laughs into ten minutes than both Dave, Jay and Jimmy put together. (don't be down Dave...you are still the king) Bill Maher had it right - Craig doesn't want or need a guest. He could just go on his rifts for an hour and hold my attention every second. The other night he opened his show with a shark puppet and I almost peed myself. There is a running joke about him and shark dating.

Craig - "I have been trying to stalk and kill my prey because I have been told its important to share my partner's interests."

Just Funny

Found on the fabulous blog of Lisa Mynx -
(http://lisa-mynx.blogspot.com/)

Just Funny Again

Also found on the fabulous blog of Lisa Mynx -
(http://lisa-mynx.blogspot.com/)

Michael Cho

The Black Coat (http://chodrawings.blogspot.com/)


LOVE the design work of Michael Cho who is a Toronto based illustrator. His work reminds me of those drawing in the ancient Childcraft books I had as a kid. Maybe due to printing limitation of the day they always were only two-toned. When I was working in Coronation the school library got rid of most of the books that they had in that school since the 1930s and I scooped up as many as I could. Great design work and deceptively simple illustrations at a time when only black and white photos appeared in encyclopedias or children's books. I would love him to do an entire Marvel or DC comic in his two-toned style. I would be as great as Darwyn Cooke THE NEW FRONTIER that tells the story of the early days of DC comics in a style not seen before but one that feels very familiar and comforting - a return to the atomic age of design.

Election '08

How come I heard NOTHING about these two candidates? As much as I love brother Obama I would have stuffed envelopes for this dream team. Ah, but what would have been the use? - society is set up to keep the swamp monster and the barbarian down. It would have been one hell of an inauguration though. I also love the smile on Swamp Thing's face like he just took a rake to his head and is trying to put his best lawn face forward.
(Also from Micahel Cho at http://chodrawings.blogspot.com/)

A Lawsuit Just Waiting To Happen

Although I would pay to see some poor bastard take these to a frozen lake somewhere and light the fuse. Give a speed skater a half kilometer head start and watch the fun as rocket boy tries to catch up. See the things I imagine when I take a wander through my own head. SO WHERE IS MY TV SHOW BITCHES?!?

Raygun Fever

I have a deep and abiding love for any kind of raygun - the more steampunk design the better. I also love the look of many of those 50s era rayguns toys that reflect the atomic age (which inspired the futuristic look that we were supposed to be experienceing today). But of course without my jetpack I can't really live in my dommed condo on the moon can I? These below are more art pieces with all the glass and polished metal. I would hope that when you pull the trigger you get a flash of lightning in the glass barrel. But I never get what I want do I? Makes me feel like I have to wait for an alien invasion to get either my jetpack or my raygun. Lets hope the aliens have something like Project Raygun in Alpha Centauri because I will be so disappointed if they have poor design sensibilities. I mean you travel millions of miles to get here and you can't match your shoes to your outfit and have your raygun clash with your space helmet. Even the early Mercury astronauts realized that it was all about the "look" baby!

Kitty Escapes

It seem sometimes that people just print books becasue they know I would want to read them. Its like there is a never ending stream of kitty information out there for me to digest. Long Live Felus Catus!

Bush Still Haunts Us

This is an old image but Alex Ross (my favorite painter) got this right and we are all feeling the effects of George Bush's rape of the dream of Amercica. I am annoyed that the Republicans are giving Obama only one chance to set this right while refusing to acknowledge the harm he actually did. I soooooo hate ideologes. I hope Obama does suceed just to ram it down their throats in the next election. Rush Limbagh can suck it and suck it hard. Anyone who wished for Bush to fail after 911 would have been in jail seven years ago. The death of politics as usual can't come soon enough for me. So explain to me why NOBODY seems to be vetting these choices for Obama's cabinet? Why all the tax problems? This is embarassing Barack. And Tom Dashel??? He is the poster boy for corruption in the Congress and if I remember correctly he was given the boot for his unethical behavior and this is the best guy you could come up with for your Secretary of Health and Human Service? Somebody today told me that is just the way they do things in Chicago where Barack got his political education and that worries me. All he is doing is giving amunition to those looking for him to fail. He has the goodwill of the American people and the world right now and he can't afford to squander it on rewards for old school Democrats. Turn away from the Dark Side brother!

Why Oh Why Can't They Accept My Resume

Because like the Green Lantern Corp they are racist and just want to keep the white man down. I look great in a gold helmet bitches!

Somebody FINALLY Got It Right - Analyzing the Taliban

"A FUNDAMENTAL reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can't understand Afghanistan is that they don't recognize that we're dealing with alien life-forms. Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We're divided into two sexes (more or less). And we're mortal. But that's about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.In my years as an intelligence officer, I saw colleagues make the same blunder over and over: They rushed to stress the ways in which the Russians, the Chinese or the Iranians were "just like us." It's the differences that kill you, though. I was an effective intelligence officer. Why? In junior high, I matured past the French Existentialists and started reading science fiction. The prose was often ragged, but the speculative frameworks offered a useful approach to analysis. Begin with the view that all opponents are aliens from another cultural planet. Build your assessment from a blank slate. What do the alien collectives desire or fear? How do they perceive the galaxy? What are their unique weaknesses? Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliché that "all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children." How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults? When girls and women are denied education or even health care and are executed by their own kin for minor infractions against the cult, how does that square with our insistence that all men want greater opportunities for the kids? What about those Afghan parents who approve of or even encourage suicidal attacks by their sons? This not only confounds our value system, but defies biological reason. So: These humanoid forms with which we must deal don't all want or value the same things we do. They form different social aggregates and exchange goods and services within wildly different parameters (and exhibit hypocritical sexual tastes that diverge from procreative mandates - ask our troops about that). These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though. The point isn't to argue that Afghans are inferior beings. It's just that they're irreconcilably different beings - more divergent from our behavioral norms than the weirdest crew member of the starship Enterprise. As an analytical exercise, try to understand Afghanistan as a hostile planet to which we have been forced, in self-defense, to deploy military colonies. How do the bizarre creatures on that other planet view us? What do they want? What will they accept? Is killing us business, pleasure - or both? Are there tribes among these aliens with which we can cooperate? Which actions of ours inflame the alien psyche? What will the alien willingly die for? What does the alien find inexplicable about us? Must we preserve a useful climate of fear? Do we intend to maintain our military colonies out there in deep space? For how long? Can the angry planet ever be sanitized of threats? Of course, there's more in play than images of our "starship troopers" combating those alien life-forms that call themselves "Taliban." This exercise is just meant to break our mental gridlock, to challenge our crippling assumption that we're all merry brothers and sisters who just have to work through a few small understandings. This is a "war of the worlds" in the cultural sense, a head-on collision between civilizations from different galaxies.

And the aliens don't come in peace." -Ralph Peters

Groundhogs Suck

I hate February 2nd because that is the day that some poor poor rodent in Punxsutawney P.I. gets pulled from his warm box in which they have imprisoned him for all year just to predict the future (which we all know its the gift all magical ground rodents have). Although they claim its the same "Phil" every year we know that when one dies they got two or three more in the freezer waiting to go into the box. Then of course before they pull him out they drug him worse that the playmates have to drug Heff before sleepover night. Just once I want that big rodent to dig his claws into the neck of the guys manhandling him. And it really doesn't matter what they say, Spring comes at the same time every year.. during SPRING, BITCHES.

Pisces Iscariot - Feathers

I am not such a fan of poetry but I know what I like and I like his poem FEATHERS (especially the second stanza)

In your headlong flight to deny the night
Its pound of sleeping flesh
You bypassed the gates where love awaits
your pounding heart enmeshed

You forsook too soon the waxing moon
And drowned yourself in stars
To grapple free of your family tree
And spend your life on Mars

But here below where time moves slow
And workers toil in torment
We were left behind in salt to find
Those dreams you never sent

But promises made and loyalties fade
In the monsoon of mystification
Leaving you high on the equinox tide
Without access to apt medication

But who are we to set you free
From the path of least resistance
When all we know may rot below
In the scrabble for our subsistence

For days will come and days will go
In the rush to reach the prize
And through journey slept, slow and ill-adept
Will we arrive surprised?

Another Cool Cat Story (or I Want a Car Kitty)

"When I owned a pickup truck, my cat Eddie used to enjoy sitting on top of the instrument panel, under the windshield, where he watched the highway while I drove. I was commuting to a regular job at that time, and if I altered my everyday route even slightly, Eddie would look at me and meow, indicating that he had noticed the change in our routine—although whether he approved or disapproved was hard to determine.

After some vandals stole the pickup truck and urinated into the gas tank before abandoning it, I bought a car. Its more steeply raked windshield allowed insufficient room for Eddie to sit under it, so, I made a shelf for him which hooked onto the hardware associated with the sun visor, and I stapled a piece of doormat to the shelf so that Eddie could dig in his claws. I suspect that a primary reason why many cats dislike riding in cars is that they don't feel entirely secure on a moving object if they cannot use their claws effectively.

The next time we went for a drive, Eddie located himself on the shelf without any prompting. He seemed to understand its purpose immediately. This photo was taken outside my Florida house when he was waiting for our morning commute to begin.

In my experience, if you treat a cat as “just an animal,” that's how he will behave. He will sense that you are not really trying to understand him, and naturally enough, he will give up trying to communicate. The more you engage with him as an equal and try to understand his perspective on the world, the more he will respond to you, and the closer your relationship may become." - Charles Platt by way of Boing Boing